


Five Ways Clint Sees This Ending

by thealexandriaarchives



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Clint is a Dumbass But We Love Him Anyway, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-29
Updated: 2012-08-29
Packaged: 2017-11-13 03:10:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/498783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thealexandriaarchives/pseuds/thealexandriaarchives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Worrying about the future isn't really Clint's style, but every so often he doesn't have much of a choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Ways Clint Sees This Ending

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not happy with it, but it broke my dry spell. Unbeta'd, and full of Clint being stupid.

It was so simple ten years ago. 

Clint was a sniper. Clint worked for the good guys.

Natasha was a mercenary. Natasha worked for anybody, up to and including the _really_ bad guys.

One arrow, one paycheck, one bottle of cheap whiskey to celebrate. Boom. Done.

And then she had to go and be a variable.

*****

Clint isn’t really the type to daydream.

Don’t get him wrong, he fantasizes just like any other redblooded American male- 

_Especially that one expanding on the time Natasha had told him about her cover on the photoshoots in Tokyo with the four other Russian supermodels and the Olympic sized Jacuzzi_ -

-but daydreaming about the future in all its annoying probabilities isn’t really his style.

But he is a sniper, and 98% of a sniper’s job is waiting. 

Sitting in the nest, often in incredibly uncomfortable contortions, on high alert for hours at a time you wait for the perfect shot to wander along and present itself.

It’s pretty straightforward- except for the fact that it's physically impossible to maintain high alert for hours at a time. 

Adrenaline levels crash, hyperawareness cannibalizes itself when there’s nothing to be aware of. Boredom is a fact of human physiology.

You try to ground yourself in reality. Recheck your exits, your sights, your wind gage, but eventually you automatically start fast forwarding to the actual shot, your exits, potential threats or scenarios you hadn’t planned for, some bordering on the absurd as your mind desperately scrabbles for something to occupy it.

And sometimes these scenarios spill out into other aspects of your life.

He’s thought it over quite a bit, and he’s statistically pretty sure Natasha is going to be the thing to kill him one of these days.

The how of it changes every time he runs these mental simulations, but never really matters in the end.

Brainwashing, a massive coronary during ridiculously good sex, one of them gets flipped again, he just pisses her off slightly too much one day… it doesn’t really matter.

There’s no doubt which one of them is better at hand-to-hand combat. The concussion and grapefruit sized bruise he sported after the Tesseract incident proved that. 

It’s a good deal harder to incapacitate someone who’s trying to kill you than it is to snap their neck with your elbow, a move he _knows_ she had the opening for twice.

And when it came down to it, he wouldn’t really have the heart to stop her.

*****

Clint specifically doesn’t think about the extremely small handful of scenarios in which Natasha dies first.

He knows what he’d do. Track down every single fucker involved in any conceivable way, kill them all in slow, precise ways that would make Natasha proud, then climb into the bottom of a bottle and go Hulk-baiting.

But with Red Room enhanced aging and healing, her skillset, intelligence and all around existence in what he considers to be pretty goddamn close to perfection the chances of that ever happening are minuscule.

Especially when you add in the factor of Clint jumping in front of any stray bullets, literal and metaphorical, that he can. 

(Way #46 Natasha is Probably Going to Kill Him: While swearing at him in Hungarian that if he doesn’t keep his eyes open she’ll crawl down to the pits of hell and pluck them out herself.)

*****

A far more likely development is that one of these days, Natasha’s simply going to come to her senses and leave.

Clint’s not blind, he knows what he sees when he looks in the mirror.: a decent looking face, nice eyes, and a grin that gets him into more trouble than it does out.

He’s good at what he does, but he lives in a mansion full of demi-gods and genetically enhanced supergeniuses. Self-consciousness is kind of bound to come with the territory.

But for reasons somewhat beyond his comprehension, Natasha still drags him off around a corner with a feral glint in her eye every time he pulls off a particularly nice shot and takes out four Doombots at once and every so often honest to god _laughs_ when he pulls pranks on Stark.

He gets it. They’ve been partners for years now. Saved each other’s asses more times than they care to think about. They can communicate without speaking most of the time on the field, and Natasha will actually allow herself to pass out on his shoulder when being airlifted out of whatever warzone Fury dropped them into that week.

It’s about loyalty and trust. Two things Natasha’s always had… difficulties with. But they’re there, and they’re important, and they’re not going away.

But it still doesn’t keep him from wondering about what’ll happen when he can’t keep up with the rest of the team anymore, no super-serums or armored suits to help him out.

Or from worrying about the shot he doesn’t see, the mirrored fear of all snipers, the one that will cripple his bow arm and leave him useless, the cost of the calculated risk of freedom of movement over armor.

Or wondering about the seemingly inevitable day when Natasha just looks at him and wonders why she chose a washed up carnie kid with an attitude and a bird fetish over her freedom all those years ago.

But he gets it.

Sort of.

*****

Sometimes, since they’ve retired from the majority of S.H.I.E.L.D. operations for the Avengers Initiative full time, Clint allows himself to daydream about happy endings.

Of a sort.

Where the world finally gets the picture and backs off a bit under their relentless counterattacks.

He and Tasha could buy a safe house together and disappear for months at a time. Somewhere cold for her, somewhere with trees for him. A heavily fortified Swiss chalet maybe. Ooh, with rafters. And a target range in the basement and a library with a circular staircase. Even Stark doesn’t have one of those.

Neither one of them’s ever had to kill anyone in Switzerland. Well, outside of Zurich, that is.

They could go off the grid for weeks at a time, and play out their version of an old married couple. Him curled up on the couch watching bad action movies, her reading leatherbound copies of obscure books in even more obscure languages.

And when they got restless they could pick up odd jobs on the side. Nothing too drastic, just easy jobs where they could watch each other’s backs and stay in shape.

Yeah. He doesn't really believe that one either.

*****

But like he said before. Clint isn’t the type to daydream often. Especially these days. Avengers work rarely calls for a sniper placement and hours of prep work before the battle. They tended more towards the brute force method, which, hey: If you’ve got Thor and the Hulk to back you up, why not?

Life’s too short to spend moping about the future. It’s much better spent dropping gummy worms down the back of Stark’s shirt during one of Steve’s ‘Educational’ horror movie marathons.

Or wrestling with Natasha on the training mat until his bruises have bruises and she pulls him off to kiss it better in the shower.

Or suiting up with your teammates to take down a legion of HYDRA goons intent on trashing Central Park’s Saturday morning population with a gas that makes you see forty foot caterpillars.

Nothing lasts forever, and if you think about that too long your head’ll explode.

So he doesn’t.


End file.
